From the beginning, it was nearly impossible for Lenworth to calm Opal. She cried as if she already knew that what surrounded her was inadequate. She cried as if she knew precisely what and who was missing. When she first learned to focus her gaze, she looked at his eyes and then away at the space near his ear as if looking for something next to him, as if she knew that another face should occupy the space that immediately surrounded him.
So it was no surprise to Lenworth when Opal, at one year old, looked at Sister Ivy and called her Mama, and at four, when she started attending the Anchovy Basic School, asked, “How come I don’t have a mother? How come I only have a grandmother and no mother?”
They were in Lenworth’s workshop, the converted fowl coop, Opal playing with a doll in the sawdust and feeding the doll bits of the curled ribbons of shaved wood that lined the floor like carpet, and Lenworth fiddling with an old tricycle with rusting steel, a redand-white checkered seat, and green tassels hanging from the handles. Even at four years old, Opal was a wisp of a girl easily mistaken for a two-year-old, a wisp of a girl who was always a step behind the growth and development charts. He wanted to think she would grow up to be as lithe and thin as his mother rather than into the stocky frame he had inherited from his father.
Lenworth, with his back turned to Opal, pretended not to hear. He had known this question would eventually come. Yet he hadn’t exactly prepared for it. All the other stories he had told about Plum had come without prompting. He always suspected that when Opal asked he would know instinctively what to say. He waited for the moment to pass, for Opal to move on to something else.
But, as if she knew he wanted her to let it go, she dug in, holding on to the topic like she would the end of a rope in a tug-of-war. She moved closer to him, grabbed hold of the green tassel and shook it. “What happened to Mommy?”
Lenworth looked down at Opal, away, and down again, then he stooped so they were eye to eye and gave her a fairytale. “Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a bird woman and he kept her like a parrot in a cage so she wouldn’t fly away. Every day when he went off to work, she cried. He didn’t understand why she was so sad all the time. He tried everything he could think of to make her happy. He bought her new toys. He painted her birdcage. But nothing made her happy. One day he found her crying and she told him she wanted so very much to see the world. She said flying again would make her happy. And he wanted her to be happy. So he opened the cage. He wanted to test whether she loved him enough to stay if he set her free from the cage. As soon as he opened the door to the cage, she flew away. And when she flew away, she left you behind so that I wouldn’t be alone after she was gone. Your mother flew away, Opal, and she left you behind.” He turned back to the tricycle with the bent wheel spokes.
Opal turned away too, lifting her dress as she moved, looking beneath to confirm what she already knew: she didn’t have wings or feathers.
Getting up and stepping away from Opal, what struck Lenworth was how much his daughter looked like her mother. He already knew it, but the resemblance was even more striking now. Opal had lost the pudginess around her face and eyes. The distinctly almond shape of her eyes was more prominent now and her irises were more like topaz against her dark skin. Plum’s eyes. Plum’s smile. He hadn’t missed the features as he wanted to believe. He had simply buried his guilt so deeply that he forgot that he hadn’t created his child alone.
He imagined Plum now, a university student in the midst of her studies in anthropology or archaeology, or going on to a career studying the past and reconciling it with the present. Not in Brooklyn, though. He didn’t imagine she would have returned there, or, if she had, she wouldn’t have stayed with the parents she believed had abandoned her. He pictured her instead in Washington, DC, at Howard University perhaps, even though he knew nothing about the city except for what he learned from grainy images on the news. But a university as iconic as Howard, rich with history and culture, would have suited her well. He pictured her as he had last seen her, her head thrown back, eyes closed, a finger against her lips. Except she was in a library surrounded by books, moving on as he hadn’t been able to.
Sister Ivy came upon Lenworth quietly. Now, she came in the mornings to get Opal ready, picked up Opal from school and stayed for a part of the afternoon to watch Opal as he finished up in the workshop.
“Mobay High needs a carpenter,” Sister Ivy said. “Fixing desks and such.”
Lenworth, who had been sweeping sawdust into a corner of his workshop, stopped. He hadn’t told Sister Ivy of his history with the girl’s school and he didn’t want to bring it up. This work, carpentering and making useful objects out of discarded scraps, was far removed from the adult life he had imagined for himself, an engineer building inspired projects and branding the world with his creations.
In four years, he hadn’t been near a high school, had stopped thinking about equations and formulas. He measured the depth and length and height of wood and cut necessary angles, but he didn’t think about theorems and calculations, algebra or geometry, just the bare shape and size of things. What Sister Ivy dangled before him would bring him much too close to the type of place where he had lost everything—the job and the dream and ultimately Plum. Not that he thought what had happened between him and Plum would repeat itself; there was no other like Plum, no one who could have taken her place.
“I can’t,” he said, and pointed to his workshop. “What about this?”
“More stable for you and Opal,” she said. “And you have weekends and evenings to do your little tinkering.”
He hated that she called his work tinkering.
“Let me think about it.”
“Don’t take too long. I told the principal you wouldn’t miss such an opportunity and he’s expecting you to come this week for an interview.”
Lenworth couldn’t think of a way out that didn’t involve a revelation of his secrets. All evening he waited for his mind to settle on an excuse that he could give, but nothing he thought of was good enough.
Up on the verandah, Opal played with a one-footed doll. She held the doll on the railing and made it do cartwheels. Sooner or later the doll would tumble ten feet or so to the ground, and Opal would retrieve it and start again. Sometimes he thought she dropped the doll purposefully, part of an ongoing experiment to figure out the purpose of such inanimate things. He watched her now, the cloistered girl with only a doll, an old lady, and him as companions. He did his best with Opal. He was sure he could have done even more. But there was no certainty that a full-time job at a school would open up large possibilities for his family of two.
In the morning when he woke, he grated a ball of cocoa and set chocolate tea on to boil with coconut milk. Sister Ivy drank it most mornings and he left it on the stove for her and Opal, then went into the planted fields in the flat below the house, telling himself that he wasn’t hiding from Sister Ivy, but simply pruning parasitic vines from the fruit trees and reaping bananas and plantains and cocoa to supplement the day’s meals.
In the damp and overgrown plot of land, he waited out his time. But Sister Ivy, always punctual, didn’t come.
Lenworth dressed Opal himself, brushed the plaits Sister Ivy made the previous morning, scrambled an egg and buttered toast, and walked her up to the basic school, where already the children romped on every empty space outside the school, and their squeals and laughter lit up the morning.
And on to Sister Ivy’s house. Even before he knocked and got no answer, circled Sister Ivy’s barking dog and held it back with a crooked stick, he knew that everything was not all right. There were lights on in the house that she would have turned out before going to bed. The curtains fluttered. She would have closed the shutters to keep out the bugs and mosquitoes and the drafty night air. Before he went in and found her stiff body, he knew one thing: the axis and balance of his life had once again shifted.